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from the I-wonder-if-they-track-sales-of-tin-foil? dept.
http://www.cio.com/article/2977027/intel-reveals-big-datas-dirty-little-secret.html
The article is entitled "Intel reveals big data's dirty little secret" but I read it a little bit differently.
From the article: "Companies are spending billions on tools and engineering to analyse big data, though many are hampered by one little problem: they still don't know what to do with all the data they collect."
This means that, of all the egregious breaches of personal privacy that companies regularly perform (the Target-knows-you're-pregnant-when-your-parents-don't story comes to mind), they have still only scratched the surface of making sense of your information, and using it effectively. Which means that, as Big Data gets people who actually know what they're doing, the more frightening the possibilities become, which is probably only a matter of time.
How would you feel about getting a bunch of targeted spam from divorce lawyers because your wife/husband's personal details were in the big Ashley Madison data leak, before you even heard about it? What if you were the guy who got drunk and put a profile up one time after a big fight but never followed up on it? This is why I don't have a Facebook account.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @03:44PM
You really have to go out of your way not to connect to facebook. The 'wall/post' feature is only a small portion of the advertising engine they have. They have web bugs and scripts everywhere. People put them on their pages to 'connect to my facebook'. But it is really helping them track you even more.
Big data is kinda of a joke. People collect all this data then have 0 clue what to do with it. I have terabytes of the stuff at work. After 2 years of collecting stuff like this they finally said 'oh we need to do something with it what should we do?' then promptly hired consultants to tell them what to do. Instead of using it to make customers lives better. They use to connect it to advertising. sigh...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:04PM
It's not just that, imagine what would have happened if the Nazis had had access to this amount of data. It's not likely that something of that scale will happen again, but since then there's been Rwanda and Bosnia amongst others. Not to mention the various authoritarian regimes out there right now.
Even if you don't live in an authoritarian regime, you can still have your life ruined if the information gets released or your information is similar to somebody else. I wonder how many people are being caught up in the AM scandal that weren't actually using the service.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Justin Case on Saturday August 29 2015, @05:16PM
> They have web bugs
RequestPolicy
> and scripts everywhere.
NoScript
On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use a computer/browser without these basic defenses, I am startled by how overflowing with crap and bloat things have become. And yet people tolerate it, apparently! Real life example of the allegorical boiled frog perhaps?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:42PM
Most people are technically clueless. Unless capabilities like NoScript and RequestPolicy are inherit in all browsers, people do not even know they have options to block a lot of the crap, along with having a more secure browsing experience.
The industry relies on the ignorance of the masses, and the technically savvy are too much in the minority to make any difference in how sites operate.
For those that do not use something like RequestPolicy, I encourage you to try it out just to see how f'ed up things are. It is not unusual for it to to block several different trackers on a single page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @07:25PM
> They have web bugs
RequestPolicy
> and scripts everywhere.
NoScript
Imagine if we all had to be mechanics in order to drive our cars safely.
And yet people tolerate it, apparently! Real life example of the allegorical boiled frog perhaps?
They tolerate it because the immediate value they receive is perceived to be significantly greater than the price they are paying. That is human nature, we significantly discount future costs, especially costs that we don't have clear visualization of.
(Score: 1) by dingus on Saturday August 29 2015, @09:14PM
>imagine if we all had to be mechanics in order to drive our cars safely
it was kinda like that until the late 50s.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:26AM
Imagine if we all had to be mechanics in order to drive our cars safely.
Installing and using such add-ons doesn't take much knowledge.
Imagine if people didn't even have to have the slightest bit of knowledge about driving a car before they started driving a car on the same roads everyone else uses, with no supervision.